[rounded up from 3.5]

“Where shall I put all these gifts with which the summer morning rewards me — and only me? Save them for future books? Use them immediately for a practical handbook: How to Be Happy? Or getting deeper, to the bottom of things: understand what is concealed behind all this, behind the play, the sparkle, the thick, green, greasepaint of the foliage? For there really is something, there is something!“

Anyone who runs regularly will understand the experience of reading this novel: you have to slog through the hard parts to get to the transcendent and rewarding parts. Certain sections were deadly dense and dull (and no doubt made worse by my limited knowledge of Russian literature, to which there are a litany of references), but much is made of the breathtaking beauty of ordinary life; this is really my bread and butter when it comes to art and literature — and life! Nabokov creates gorgeous and unusual imagery of beautiful everyday, from shop tables to hearses to shadows, and it’s this that makes the (at times dry and meandering) novel remarkable.

“He’s a great writer, but he has nothing to say.” That's the judgement about Nabokov by his near-contemporary and compatriot, the writer Isaac Babel. A bit over-the-top, perhaps, but not unwarranted given what this book, written in Berlin in the mid-1930s, studiously avoids. While there is no lack of allusions to Germans and Germany (Nabokov had been living there for more than a dozen years, after all) the book offers hardly a hint of a country being frog-marched toward the gates of hell. For Nabokov, evidently, it just wasn’t worth mentioning. Hence Berlin's Russian emigré community, from which the book’s main living characters are drawn, seems to carry on within its own phantasmic bubble. (Here Nabokov does air political views, often in withering sarcasm about the Bolsheviks and their politics. But about Nazis I could detect nothing.)
Apart from that insouciance, many of the book's literary allusions make some of it inaccessible for readers like me, who may have read bits of Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov &c. in translation, but have only rudimentary notions about Russian literature, which for Nabokov is at the heart of the book, indeed its ‘heroine’. Further obstacles crop up in the recherché vocabulary, in the gratuitously antique syntax and in obscure Slavic terms like tarantass and babajaga. Such words sent me scuttling again and again to reference works. Perhaps they were intended as pastiche, but I think some of these affectations were Nabokov's way of thumbing his nose at the average educated reader. My advice: Get an annotated version or guidebook (a rapid Internet search for such things yielded nothing satisfactory) that doesn’t condescend to the reader.

yetenek, nabokov’un son ve birçok değerlendirmeye göre en iyi rusça romanı. içeriğiyle yazarın berlin’deki sürgün/göçmenlik günlerine ve yazarlığının oluşma sürecine ışık tutarken, biçimiyle de, özgün/sıra dışı olmayı başarıyor. daha net ifade etmek gerekirse: içinde bir şiir kitabı/şiir-edebiyat eleştirisi, bir gelişim ve aşk hikayesi, bir çernişevski biyografisi ve ayrıca bir tür roman içinde roman barındırıyor yetenek ve tüm bunlarla birlikte otobiyografik bir temele dayanıyor. nabokov’un romancılıkta neden ve nasıl ayrı bir yerde durduğunu, daha doğrusu duracağını, edebiyat tarihinde kendine neden eşsiz bir yer edineceğini gösteriyor. nabokov’un yazarlık hikayesi sanki yetenek romanının devamı gibi ilerleyecek, yazar-kahramanımız gelişimini anadilini terk edip bir başka dilde yeniden var olarak tamamlayacak. belki yetenek de o zaman, lolita’dan, solgun ateş’ten, ada ya da arzu’dan sonra bakıldığında yerini, anlamını, değerini bulacak.

Includes: Hunting expeditions in Tibet; fake executions; nude sunbathing; mysterious disappearances; Siberian exiles; three-way suicide pacts; left-wing censorship; recurring ghosts; Russian emigre life in Berlin; an affecting love story; the secrets of fictional composition; and much, much more. One of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces.

Nabokov, io ti voglio davvero bene, ma per questa volta mi rifiuto di recuperare 400 anni di storia della letteratura e della poesia Russa, ti riprenderò un giorno

Наконец-то прочитал «Дар» Набокова!
Чувствую облегчение, но всё-таки рад, что смог освоить.

Написано кучеряво, виртуозно, если смотреть вблизи, но от этого читать зачастую сложно при отдалении.
Не развлечение, а литературный труд!

А прочитав 4 главу (представляющую биографию
Чернышевского) я был изнемождён и зол настолько, что даже сделал запись о ней в заметках:

Наконец-то дочитал 4 главу Дара Набокова.
Воспринимаю это как подвиг - добротная часть вниги, представляющая из себя клигу, полную неймдропинга из середины 19 века и бифов на них же. Эстетическое удовольст зие выскребается с трудом, проявляясь в некоторых деталях описания, фразил, претендующих на афоризмичность, но при удалении всё превращается в перемываниях костей старику, которого ругают ха неактуальность, что в 21 веке воспринимается ещё более неактктуальным. Да, можно сказатьб что это пишет не набоков, а его герой, и что в этом и смысл, но удовольствия эта перспектива не добавляет. Конечно впереди ещё 5 глава, но я пока не представляю, что может оправдать эти несколько дней чтения, стиснув зубы.
Отдельную пытку представляет знание факта, что в оригинальном издании эту главу убрали, но авторитет автора заставляет её прочитать (мб я сам дурак?), причём прочитать до конца, раз начал, раз уж взялся за этот последний русский роман. Тем более его сестра считала его лучшим у него.

Some people like the book but hate the inserted monograph on Chernychevsky. I would reverse that equation. Chernychevsky deserves most of our attention.

The last, longest, and greatest of Nabokov's Russian novels, a project that in some form occupied him for much of the 1930s (published in 1938, Nabokov "ordered its bricks" in 1933), is frequently compared to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but I think it's better, and more ambitious (a rival for Ulysses actually). Nabokov focuses not so much on Fyodor's childhood and youth (although they are powerfully present in the first chapter) as much as on his growth and expansion as a quickly maturing writer, and on his impassioned relation to Russian literary tradition--more interesting processes, and much harder to render dramatically. This novel's ingenuity is unbounded. It communicates the essence of Nabokov's art, and displays his total mastery.

Светът на "Дар" е толкова сложен, необичаен, фантастичен, мисля си дори - фантасмагоричен, че това със сигурност е роман, който има нужда от повече от един прочит. Не мога да преценя какво пропуснах от съдържанието, но не улових всички нюанси, не разгадах пластовете докрай, не успях да последвам полета на авторовото въображение и не се оказах готова за пълнотата и пълнокръвието на тази книга. Страниците плавно преливат от една в друга и точно, когато ми се струваше, че следя повествованието, че съм схванала дълбочината, ме изненадваше поредната развръзка - недействителна, нереална. Герои, съдби, биографични факти, исторически събития, места и усещания - всички те се докосват, пресичат, разминават. Дали?!

Намирам езика за прекрасен, изключително богат, страхотно нюансиран, едновременно подмамващ и реален. Но това едва ли изненадва някого, Набоков владее някакво рядко заклинание, което му позволява да си играе с думите и значенията им и да ги подрежда по необясним, неповторим начин.

"Дар" има специфичен послевкус - стигайки до финала, се чувствах така, в��е едно тепърва ми предстои среща, която всъщност вече се е състояла. Странно е и по някакъв начин напълно омагьосващо.

Read the first part. Nabokov at his most intolerably arch, self-regarding, pore-clogging, and fustian.

I need context to understand the Дар. Думаю, не последнее прочтение, и точно после этого возьму комментарий Долинина. В любом случае, местами абсолютно гениально, но в некоторые метатекстуальные вещи надо врубаться сильнее, чтобы оценить полностью.

Half way through this novel, we come on a scene where Russian writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky smudges his old boots with ink to hide the scuff marks, and freshens up his bootlaces at the same time by dipping them into the ink pot. Then he carelessly drops one of the ink-soaked laces onto a page he'd just written.

It’s difficult to imagine that scene in an age when we rarely see an ink bottle, never mind dip anything into it. The ink we use today is safely sealed in cartridges, and more often destined for electronic printers than for any kind of writing instrument. However, this little scene made me wonder what would happen if an inky bootlace fell on a page of Nabokov's writing. I imagined a snake of ink blots sliding across the text causing some words to disappear completely, others to be partially obliterated, their shape emerging from the blackness like phantoms. Still others would be transformed into new words by the deletion of a beginning syllable, a middle one or an ending.
And then I wondered how the text would read after the accident.
Like something in code?
Like something that has been censored?
Like something only partially formed, something that has not yet emerged from a chrysalis state?
Or like a text read in a dream..

The Gift, the last novel Nabokov wrote in Russian, and the most exciting of his I’ve read, offers all those variations, and much, much more.

Fyodor Godunov, poet and writer, is the first-person narrator of the book. But like a knight who has moved sideways and fallen of the edge of a chessboard, Fyodor seems to be outside the world of the main story, watching himself, the other knight as it were, still active on the squares of the storyboard, and referred to in the third person.

The early chapters of his narrative read like a dream in every sense of that phrase; Fyodor takes time out from describing daily life in Berlin in the 1920s - the chessboard of the main story - to look back at a time before the time of the story, a time that seems very remote and only visible as if through a moiré curtain. With a painter's eye for the effects of dissolving light and shimmering shade, he recreates a secondary narrative, the smoky outlines of that time before time, the childhood spent in a country that doesn't exist anymore but to which he holds the keys: Russia before the revolution. Fyodor mislays keys many times in the course of the book but he is certain that he will never mislay the keys to his Russia because he carries his homeland inside himself.
Ought one not to reject any longing for one’s homeland, for any homeland besides that which is with me, within me, which is stuck like silver sand of the sea to the skin of my soles, lives in my eyes, my blood, gives depth and distance to the background of life’s every hope? Some day, interrupting my writing, I will look through the window and see a Russian autumn.

To return to the framework of Fyodor’s Berlin story, there emerges within it a third entirely different but equally interesting narrative. Through a circuitous set of circumstances involving various interesting coincidences, Fyodor finds himself researching and writing a memoir of the Russian revolutionary writer-poet, Nicolay Chernyshevski (1828-1889) whose novels influenced many political activists including Lenin. But just as insects learn to mimic their surroundings in order to fool their enemies, Fyodor’s memoir is only the mimicry of a memoir. Though adequately factual and suitably literary, it is in reality a satire aimed at all the writer-revolutionaries like Chernyshevsky whose clumsy inky boots had trampled all over the literary legacy of Russia built so carefully by Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Bely and many more.

Not surprisingly, the editors and critics among the Russian emigré community in Berlin turn out to be very sharp-eyed predators who are not fooled by such a pseudo memoir (which the reader gets to read in its entirety in chapter four of The Gift); they are not prepared to accept that the satire might contain truth, even if only an artistic one. Fyodor’s Chernyshevsky memoir is more or less blotted out, deleted, forgotten. (In a case of life imitating art, when Nabokov succeeded in having The Gift published in serial form in a Paris emigré magazine in 1937, it appeared without Chapter Four. The Chernyshevski chapter had once again been censored, deleted, wiped out, just as had happened in its fictional existence. It didn’t finally appear in print until the 1952 edition of The Gift).

Within the Russian doll that is The Gift lies a fourth story: Fyodor’s personal struggle to be a composer of something more lasting than literary or political satire. Before tackling the Chervyshevski memoir, he had already been searching for his own literary destiny; was he a poet, or a dramatist, or perhaps a novelist? Eventually, like Proust's narrator, he begins to figure out what it is he really wants to write about and how he wants to write it. Reading between the lines, and in spite of false trails and coded wording, the reader realises that The Gift itself is the chrysalis of the book Fyodor will one day write.

……………………………………………………………

If I've given more information than I usually do about the plot of this book, it was to emphasize the structure which I think is really brilliant. But rest assured, there are a few more Russian dolls wrapped up inside The Gift; Fyodor's Berlin life is full of character and incident, and provides a valuable record of the world of the Russian emigré community in Berlin in the 1920s.